We just had longtime friends visit. They live in a rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica that they have lived in for 40 years. They now regret they never bought anything as they feel stuck in this apartment. In Santa Monica and Los Angeles the two areas I’m familiar with there are no income restrictions for rent control apartments.
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Back on the Live Free and Die theme. I was just comparing CDC stats by state (I think this was posted in this thread though maybe in another) looking at the difference between Massachusetts (where I currently live) and Florida (where I was living for part of the year).
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be careful comparing gross numbers. For example, for COVID gross death rates, MA is #18 and Florida #37 (ugh). But once adjusted for age and co-morbidities, [lockdown] MA drops to #38 while [open] FL is #12!
CA moves similarly, dropping from #12 to #36. (CA in particular is younger and healthier than FL, so its unadjusted death rate will be lower than older Florida by definition).
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(23)00461-0
Interesting stats.
I know a lot of people are interested in living in “low tax” states. A close family member of mine does (it’s not Florida , BTW). She says “you get what you pay for”…
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I have seen retired couples move away from family to a “low tax state”, then spend a lot of time/money to visit them (especially if grandchildren). At first the idea seemed foolhardy, but in some cases the also found lower priced housing and better weather.
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I live in Brooklyn, in a rent-stabilized apartment. I have a very low income (make some money doing psychotherapy at a community mental health clinic, get social security, have mandatory withdrawals from my IRA) compared to most here; don’t own a car but rent when I need one to visit my daughter or other family members; mostly get around on the subway; could easily park on the street but I know I would never walk anywhere and that’s my exercise. My landlord pegged the original rent around $75 below what he could have charged on my first lease to make it a round number. That was in March 2020; it’s gone up a minimal amount. I love my neighborhood and apartment and my half-fare Metrocard.
My daughter’s fiance bought them a house in the town where she goes to medical school (now doing rotations at the hospital in town in her third year). She plans to seek a residency in the same general vicinity; her fiance is a pilot for United Airlines and they live close enough to Newark Airport that he can be on call from home. The hospital where she’s doing her rotations is part of a consortium of hospitals in the vicinity.
So I don’t plan to move anywhere, at least for now. I live just a few hundred feet from the street that overlooks the Hudson River harbor and Verrazano Bridge which is maybe half a mile away. It’s a lovely place to live and although my apartment faces the back and has no views, it has great light and it is quiet and clean, unlike my previous place where the bedrooms faced a busy street on the second floor. I am already pretty old–will be 75 in June; I adopted my daughter when she was almost 2 and I was almost 50. She’s 27 now. When I need more help, I will move closer to her so it is less of a burden. During the two years between graduating from college and starting medical school, she worked as a nurse’s aide, and one night she called me while walking her dog after work, saying “You will NEVER go to a nursing home!” I guess she saw a patient who had not been treated well. I spent a whole lot of time during her high school years overseeing the care of my father and stepmother who lived about an hour away in the car my dad handed down to me from my brother, and she really loved her grandpa. I am not/will not ever ask for any commitment not to put me in a facility when taking care of me would be a full-time job. I just hope (but no pressure whatsoever! it would be wonderful!) that I become a grandmother while I am young and able enough to be the kind of grandmother my mother’s mother was to me. If only! But of course that is completely out of my control.
I grew up on Long Island in the NYC suburbs and I have lived virtually all of my adult life in NYC, and the last 45 years or so in Brooklyn. I don’t plan to go anywhere for the foreseeable future. I love my work, my neighborhood and my apartment.
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It’s so hard to know what to do.
My mom and dad moved away from us when they retired. So my kids had their grandparents close for part of their lives and then not. But now mom is in a community that is not a 55+ community but basically is. She has so many friends and they rely on each other. She has support and things to do. It’s good now. I admire that she’s found her place. And it’s like going away to college, you learn to find your people away from your parents.
But my in laws, they live in the town they grew up in. Where one of their sons lived. They spent years taking care of the grandkids and helping the son in town. With his business.
Now many of their friends have either died, moved away when they retired. Or moved near their children that have moved away. There isn’t much of a peer support group. The grandkids have moved away. The child who is in town is divorced. It’s very lonely. Very different experience than what my mom has.
So do you stay close to the kids and the grandkids and then they move on? Or find your own path? Away from the family? What works at one point may not always work?
We live away from family. And most of our friends are older than us. I don’t know what the future will bring.
One parent, one kid = I will live near my grown kid. I have a ton of friends in Brooklyn but we’re all OLD, lol. There’s always Zoom. And I actively sought out my community of friends before I adopted my daughter. I am not afraid to look for friends, wherever I am. I’ve made a few new friends just this year!
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My point is that there are tons of paths and we never know which one is right. But the path is the one that is right for you.
It’s like college. There are tons of opportunities and tons of paths that work.
But me, I’m conflicted on which path is the one I should take.
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My DH answered 0 with income on a new credit card - I said that is not true, we have income from our investments. He was so thrilled to be retired but honestly, he acted way below his intellectual level.
We got a very low interest rate home loan in retirement, and providing a copy of 401k balance assured them we had the finances to make our payments.
We get a regular credit score from several sources, and nothing has changed.
Hope the rest of retirement is going well for you.
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It is hard. However I would choose being close to family. Both my parents and my kids benefited from lots of time together. I would plan (if I ever have grandchildren) to try to be an involved grandparent, but also realize once kids go to school for full days, the dynamic will change. Proximity for holiday/birthdays/etc is something I would value.
I hope that DH and I will be able to find an age appropriate place where we can find “a good fit” community. (We had to help our parents and learned a lot in the process.) Making friends doesn’t stress me out. I think we’ll be fine.
We’ve watched not only our parents, but other aging relatives. The things we’ve witnessed covers a wide spectrum of choices and situations.
What we’ve seen is:
- If you live long enough you will lose lots of friends.
- Aging requires adjusting to cognitive and physical changes.
- The ones who have fared better are the ones who were able to deal with/accept those changes and loss.
Our goal is not to be a burden to our kids.
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We just have to make the best decision we can and be willing to pivot if needed.
I live in the general area where I grew up, and I loved being near my parents and brothers, especially when my kids were little. My parents really wanted to move to Florida, which they eventually did. They loved it and made lots of friends. Unfortunately, my mom ended up with dementia, and my dad was not well equipped to deal with it. My brothers and I tried to help out as much as we could, but between working & raising our families, it wasn’t as much as we would have liked. We tried to get them to move back, but they wouldn’t - and I know that my dad was lonely after my mom died, but he refused to move back. Their neighbors, with whom they were good friends, moved back north to live near their kids as soon as my dad died. They saw how hard things were, and they decided that they were nearing a point where they really needed to be closer to family. That kind of pivot is one that not everyone wants to make, but it’s worth considering if you live far from your kids or other extended family.
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Our kids seem to be moving towards us. I think they want to be near us and specifically near ShawWife, who will be a sensational grandmother especially for kids under the age of 12 (she was an extraordinary mother for that age group as well). Also, both kids loved the exurb where they grew up and where we still live and have both said they want to raise their kids here. Plus, our new house would be great for kids past a certain age – kayaking in the river, swimming in the pool, hiking and cycling.
ShawWife moved back last summer and is hoping that when she has a mate and kids, they will live in the kids’ wing of our house. ShawSon, who is a Silicon Valley tech mafia kid, texted me out of the blue with a house for sale in our town. He asked what I thought of it. I told him it looked very good. It is probably half the price of what the same house would cost in SF. He was thinking maybe they should buy it now, rent it out, and then move in when they have kids.
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@bluebayou, if I understand you correctly, because age and co-morbidity suggest that Florida will have worse Covid results than Massachusetts, if we adjust for those (and other factors), Florida performed better on Covid than Massachusetts. It’s a bit unclear to me how one would adjust for the fact that a) Covid was introduced before there was knowledge or treatment in the Northeast and California or b) that a higher percentage of the year in MA is spent indoors than in Florida. If one were trying to measure policy effectiveness, which I think is what you are trying to do, I’d want to try to adjust for those factors as well.
It is not clear what adjustments one would make for teen birth rate or infant mortality rate or divorce rate or firearm injury death rate or homicide rate.
Maybe adjust by income for teen birth rate, infant mortality rate and drug overdose rate, but I’m not entirely sure that income is an endogenous variable because it probably is significantly affected by state policies on education, health care, safety nets, etc.
Not necessarily. I am thinking about moving to a low tax state. Doing a trial run. So far, so good. Makes me wonder what was paying all that tax for.
Does anyone know if I can gift money to an irrivocable trust? I am seeing a lawyer in a couple of weeks. To inform myself in the meantime.
@shawbridge im guessing this is a typo and you mean your daughter…not your wife…
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One would hope so, then again, who am I to judge?
Yup. ShawD is hoping that when she has a mate and kids, she can live with us. ShawWife has been there since the beginning.
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@Iglooo, I’m not a tax attorney but I did spent a lot of time learning about them about 15 years ago. I was particularly concerned about asset protection as well as estate planning (I have always thought that the high gift tax exemptions would be lowered when the government is in a cash crunch). I did a lot of reading and then hired one of the best attorneys in the country to help me think through the problem.
You can gift assets to an irrevocable trust where you are not a beneficiary. No problem. Then, of course, the assets will no longer be yours. I am assuming you mean something else.
Is your concern asset protection?
If so, there was an entire industry selling Global Asset Protection Trusts and now there are equivalent Domestic Asset Protection Trusts that claim these provide protection against creditors. They did appear to work technically. However, whenever these trusts were challenged in court for serious claims, the court pierced the veil of the trusts.
If you create a trust and transfer money into it (you are the settlor) and if you are also the beneficiary, the courts were saying the trust is essentially you. I don’t think it mattered if you were not the trustee but in these trusts, you are also often the trustee or co-trustee.
At the time, the thing you could not do is create a self-settled trust and expect asset protection. That is, if you set up the Igloo Trust and put 80% of your assets in it and you are the trustee and potential beneficiary, if there are claims against you, a court will more than likely rule that the assets are yours. If someone wins a claim against you, the judge is looking for a way to enforce and can declare that the trust is you and can create substantial pressure on you or your trustee to have the trust pay the damages you have lost. A judge could even put you in jail for contempt, I believe. Hence, such a trust would not provide protection against a law suit and I doubt it would shield the assets from Medicaid (require you to spend them before Medicaid kicks in). Not an expert on the latter.
There are steps you can take to strengthen your trust (e.g., the assets and trustee are in a different jurisdiction) or can be transferred to different jurisdictions by the trustee at will. The trust can put the assets into an LLC in a jurisdiction like Nevis whose laws specify that the only legal remedy to a judgment against the LLC is a charging order (when the manager of the LLC decides to distribute capital, the creditor gets its share). This would happen in a creditor-unfriendly jurisdiction like Nevis. Similarly, the manager could be an International Business Corporation in a creditor unfriendly jurisdiction (Caymans, BVI, etc.). None of these prevent a judge from piercing the trust, but they would make it much more expensive for a creditor to enforce.
Since I looked at this, a number of additional states set up laws allowing for DAPTs in their state. I don’t know if the new state laws solve the problems that judges in practice found ways to get around. There are other ways that can achieve the goals of asset protection and estate planning better, I believe, than a self-settled trust. But, they require special circumstances that give them much stronger protection against a judge who wants to pierce the veil.
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That’s exactly what I mean. It won’t be mine. We have a Generation Skipping trust set up a long time ago. Mismanaged and lost value. Now it is too small to interest any decent firm to take it on. I could gift to reach the minimum threshold. I am not a beneficiary. Great it can be done. Thank you!
I agree with lowering tax exemptions. We should not perpetuate wealth. It used to be $650,000.